Today we're gonna talk about how to get noticed
on LinkedIn. Loads of stuff to go through, 'cause it's
a complicated system, but I promise you, by the end of this little session, you are gonna
know how to get noticed, you are gonna know what you need to do, all the steps you need
to take, you're gonna learn about some myths, some things you've probably been told, that
don't make any sense, or certainly aren't working for you. And I'm also gonna talk with you, and put
some things in perspective about how what I'm gonna share today, is actually gonna give
you three times as much of a chance of finding your next job, than actually all the resume
submissions you've been doing into the applicant tracking systems. Alright, let's talk about LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one complicated system, it really
is. I don't know about you, the folks that I coach
in the milewalk Academy seem to be as confused as the other 500 million people on the site,
and with good reason. They are constantly going through changes,
they're changing the things that they offer, they're changing the things that you can do,
they're changing the way people are finding you, how you're getting connected. All that good stuff. Now, one of the things I wanna do today, a
little story, just to put some things in perspective for you, because I want you to understand
how important today's lesson is. Back in 2004, I started milewalk, for those
of you who know me, I came from the recruitment side of the world, milewalk is my executive
search, that I founded in 2004, we help organizations recruit talented resources. So, it's the business services side of what
I do, the milewalk Academy is my training site, and my training firm, that's where a
lot of you have probably found me. Now, when I started milewalk in 2004, LinkedIn
was actually just getting started. I think LinkedIn was an idea in 2002, I think
they might have incorporated in 2003, they really got going in 2004. So through the life of milewalk, and all the
recruitment that I've been doing, LinkedIn has been a very big part of me, my success,
and my team's success in helping locate people, developing relationships, connecting, and
all that good stuff, and now it's a huge part of sharing my message. So I've been constantly working with it every
day, I've been watching it evolve, I've been trying to stay up to date on all the features,
and all the good stuff that it offers. Also, along those 14 years, as I was recruiting
people, I've interviewed an awful lot of people, I think all told, it's about 15,000 people,
I and my company milewalk has interviewed, I've personally 12,000 people, and of the
people that we have data for, which is more than 12,000 people, we ask them questions,
we collect data. I'm always looking for trends, not only am
I looking to evaluate and help match great people with great companies, but I'm looking
and taking that opportunity to gather data, so I understand the trends in the market and
what's happening. And one question that I've asked all of those
people, that's on the phone or in person, so this is not via a survey is, "How did you
get to your current job?" So what was the medium that you used? Were you an employer referral, did you apply
on a website, did a third party recruiter call you? Whatever it might be, I'm always looking for
what was the tactic, and then how did you get there, and then the previous job, how
did you get there. So I'm looking to accumulate this data, for
those 12,000 plus people, well over 900 of them, almost 1,000, 960, 980 something like
that said, "Someone found me on LinkedIn." What that means is, the CEO of a small company,
a corporate recruiter, a hiring official, third party recruiter, somebody like that
reached out and said, "Would you be interested in talking to me, we're hiring," or "Would
you be interested in an opportunity we have at our company." Whatever it is, they were found. They were found and actually took the job,
that's eight percent. Eight percent of the people that I've collected
data for, got their job because somebody found them on LinkedIn. Wrap your mind around that. A couple of ... I think it was January, middle
of January, I did a Live Office Hour session, it was called, Why your job search is taking
so long. In that session ... If you haven't seen it,
check it out. In that session, I talked about you have an
eight percent chance of being found on LinkedIn and getting your job that way. And that's great, who wouldn't want those
eight points? That's what we want to work on with you today. But I want to put that in perspective. In that same Live Office Hour's session, I
also mentioned that of all the applicant tracking systems out there in the companies across
the world, and all the people putting their resumes into those applicant tracking systems,
you having 97% chance of never being seen by a human. That means you have a three percent chance
of actually being seen, just three. That's not even being hired, that's just being
seen. Imagine, wouldn't you want to add those eight
percentage points which is well more than three times the percentage of people getting
their jobs through the applicant tracking system. And I understand there's demographics that
come into play. But we interview a lot of different people,
across industries, across company types, across functions, and across salary levels. So, we catch a lot of the market in that data,
that I'm speaking about. So I just, I want you to understand that's
why this is so important for you to know how this works. So that's the first thing that I wanna say. Second thing is let's dive into LinkedIn and
how it works, and so I just want you to understand before we talk about the steps, what is it
in the way that LinkedIn operates, that you need to understand? So you can have perspective about why you're
taking the steps I'm recommending. The first thing is, and by the way, this is
not my opinion, this is actually research that I've done, that you can do. You can go right out to LinkedIn's website
and in the depths somewhere in that [cludgie inaudible 00:06:05] help center of theirs,
they've given me information that I'm gonna share with you, and I'm gonna add my own color
to it, but I'm gonna tell you specifically what LinkedIn has shared with us, that's you,
that's me, so this is not my opinion. There are basically four things that LinkedIn
wants you to know about how its search engine works. So when I talk about getting noticed on LinkedIn,
what I'm talking about is you being found by someone who is looking for employees to
hire. And there are many, many reasons people search
on LinkedIn, some are targeting companies, some are sales people looking to develop relationships
'cause they wanna make sales, there's a host of reasons why people search. But for the purposes of our talk today, I'm
talking along the lines of you wanting to be found, so that you might be discovered
for your next career opportunity. So when somebody is searching, LinkedIn is
telling us four things. No slides today, I got note cards, hopefully
you can see these. I scratched them really fast. The first that LinkedIn tells us is: There
is no, I hope you can see this, there is no single rank. So the first thing that LinkedIn wants us
to know is there's no single rank. What the heck does that mean? Before I explain that I'll take a sip of water. So what does no single rank mean? Well what LinkedIn is telling us, is that
there's no single ranking technique to their search engine. So to help you understand what a single ranking
search engine is, let's use an example. If you were to use Google, we all are familiar
with Google I hope. When you go and use Google, if you typed in
the Google search bar, now watch some of you are gonna go out there and type this right
in, and hopefully I won't embarrass myself. But if you go out to Google, and you type,
"22 year old" 22 year old, if you put that in Google, right now from wherever it is that
you're watching me, no matter how much or how little you've used Google, what you've
searched for, what you've purchased, what you do, where you live makes no difference. On the first page, there's gonna come up an
article that says, "34 things every 22 year old should know." I know that 'cause I wrote the article in
2013, and for a number of years it was the number one item in Google's return search
of 22 year old. I'm guessing it's somewhere on the first page
right now. But all of us, whoever we are, wherever we
are, if type that in there, we're gonna get the same search results fed back to us, in
the same sequence. So that's a single search rank, it doesn't
matter who the searcher is, it matters what the result of the internet are, and the traffic
on the article, there's probably some search engine optimization that plays a part. But for the most part, Google is delivering
back to the entire world, the most trafficked site for a particular search. That's a single rank, uniform. LinkedIn doesn't work that way, and it wants
you to know that. It says, it actually isn't a single ranking,
it's actually based on the searcher. It's based on the searcher. So what that means, is it doesn't matter what
your profile looks like, it's more dependent on what the searcher is doing. Who the searcher is, where the searcher lives,
the searcher's behavioral patterns on LinkedIn, what they do, what they don't do, if they
search, if they don't search, who they're connected to, all that good stuff. So, when you think about the searcher and
LinkedIn tailoring its search ranking and results to the searcher, it's more dependent
on the searcher. So, if I go in, I Andy LaCivita go in to my
LinkedIn account, and I go to search for somebody with project management skills. -and I go to search for somebody with project
management skills. And I type "project management" in the search
bar. A woman is going to come up, and her title's
going to say, "Project Manager" in her headline. And then she's going to say I worked here,
and I worked here, and that's it. And she's not going to have anything else
on her profile, and she's going to be my number one returned search person. Why? Because I worked with her at some company. Because I'm connected to her first degree. Because her email address is in my email phonebook
that's probably linked up with LinkedIn. So LinkedIn is saying, "Oh, you must want
to find people who are closely related to you or that you've worked with, or whatever. So I'm going to deliver you those people because
I'm assuming that it's all about the relationship, the connection, and so forth." Now you might be thinking, "Well there's nothing
I can do about who the searcher is, if I want to get over to company XYZ and I have no relationship
with that searcher." Well that may be true for most people. But you're with me! You have me, and there's never a situation
where you can't do something about it! And I'm going to get to that in a minute or
two. But I want you to know that's a second important
point that LinkedIn is telling us is based on the searcher. Third thing that LinkedIn tells us, now it's
getting a little more Google-like, profile views matter. Profile views matter. Okay? So what that means is how much traffic your
profile gets is going to have something to do with where they place it in the search
results when somebody is looking for a system engineer, a business analyst, an accountant,
a whatever. So that matters. Your profile views matter. So from that perspective, it is like Google,
where the more traffic you're getting, the more attractive LinkedIn thinks you'll be
to the person who's searching. So that's the third thing LinkedIn tells us. And the fourth thing LinkedIn tells us is
it's about keywords. It's about keywords, not keyword stuffing. "We want your keywords to make sense," LinkedIn
says. Are those keywords associated to those titles? Have you put in just a bunch of stuff? If you do that, you're going to make me dizzy,
and I'm not going to like you. And I'm not going to show you in the search
results. So those four things, LinkedIn has told us,
they've told everybody. So there's no single ranking, it's based on
the searcher, and the search, and who the searcher is, and the searcher's behavior. It's based on your profile views. And it's based on keywords. Okay? So that is, that's important for you to understand. Now if we talk about, okay, well that's all
great and good, that's how it works. What is it that you can do to actually elevate
where you're going to be seen in the searches when somebody is looking for somebody with
your skillset, your talent, in your area or wherever that might be? Now I break down these suggestions I'm about
to give you into maybe two forms. One, I like to call the static side, and one
is the dynamic side. So the static side is kind of like, do it,
build it up, and you can kind of leave it, more or less. And the dynamic side is, well, there's some
activity that you need to do on a daily, weekly, monthly, however frequently you want to do
it, that I think is also going to give you a competitive advantage from a findability
perspective. So let's get into that. All right, so what are those? What can you do? First thing, this you've been told: update
your profile. Now it may sound obvious, but there's a whole
lot to that profile that you need to understand in how to fill it in. So when I say, "Update your profile and compete
your profile," what I'm talking about is don't be chintzy. Make sure the picture looks good. Make sure you've got a nice headline. Make sure you're including important stuff
in the summary. Do not blow off the summary. Fill in all the companies that you've worked
for. Fill in your volunteer work. Fill in your awards. Fill in everything you possibly can, because
the more data that you give LinkedIn, the better off you'll be, the better off you'll
be. It will make associations for you if you worked
at a company 10 years ago and you lost touch with your favorite buddy over at that company. LinkedIn might make suggestions. It'll do a number of things to help you if
you feed it the right data. So the first thing you want to make sure you
do is you fill in that profile. Second thing, second thing is a big honking
deal, skills. Okay? Skills. Skills are one of the most popular searches
by recruiters. So when recruiters and HR people are looking
to find individuals on LinkedIn, they use skillset searches. So they go into the search bar and they type
"project manager, technology project manager, SAP, Oracle," or something of that nature. Particular skills, maybe they're looking for
an Accountant, they'll type in the particular domain expertise or competencies and other
things like that. So when you're talking about skills, some
skills are synonymous with their titles, project manager, project management office, those
kinds of things. You want to make sure those skills are embodied
in the descriptions as you cite the companies that you worked for. Other thing is LinkedIn also gives you a way
to select discreet skills in your profile. So you can select project management, project
management office, so on and so forth, CRM, Oracle, Oracle applications, whatever it is,
cost-based accounting, all those good things, leadership, things of that nature. That's what I'm talking about. So skills, skills are a big honking deal. Skills are a big honking deal. What's next? Communication, or sorry, connections. I got really messed up. Connections. The site's about connecting. Right? So the way in which you leverage those connections
is going to be important from a dynamic nature. And I suppose it's dynamic in the sense that
you've got to build those connections. But the important thing is build those connections. Develop those relationships. Request to connect with people, the more the
better. So let's not get into a philosophical debate
about whether you should be an open networker or not. For job searching purposes, the more people
you are connected to, the better it will be for you. It's a simple fact. The only thing that's better than having more
connections is having the right connection. If I only have one connection on my LinkedIn
profile, and I'm only connected to one person, but it's my CEO friend who I want to go work
for, well, then I'm in Fat City. But if you don't have a lot of CEO friends
laying around, and you're not really sure how you're going to get into a particular
organization that you should be targeting, why not connect up with the people at that
organization? So it's one thing to try to reach into a recruiter
and say, "Well, you know, I want to connect up with ... I see you're searching for this
particular position." But wouldn't it be better, or wouldn't it
be helpful at least, to identify people in that organization and start connecting with
them? Reach over to kind of your analogous counterparts. If you're a technologist, you're an engineer,
and there's other engineers at the company, send him or her a message and say, "Hey, I
liked your profile. I see we're in the same industry, or the same
market, or the same technology, or whatever. I'm always looking to build relationships
with people who I could learn from and share with. Would you be interested in connecting on LinkedIn?" What's wrong with that? Somebody say no? Big deal, you haven't lost anything. But if you can start connecting with people
in the organization, if not flat out sending them messages about wanting to work there,
but I think building up those connections will certainly help you. Because that person is likely connected to
the recruiter, and she's looking for people, and technologists, and folks to bring in her
organization. And with her searching, the closer in relationship
you are to people that she works with, the more she's going to like it, and the more
probable that you're going to come up in her search. So before when I said it's based on the searcher
and the searcher's patterns, and I said, "Well, you can't really do anything about it," heck
yes, you can go and start connecting with people in the company. Just be thoughtful about it. Don't be reckless. I don't want you to blindly be connecting,
and you get tons and tons of rejections. I just, be thoughtful. Send a smart, nice message, and I think you'll
be, number one, you'll be building your network, at a minimum. And number two, you're giving yourself a better
chance to be discovered by the recruiters and the people that matter. Okay, number four, standard titles, standard
titles. Don't be cute. This is not the time to be funny on your LinkedIn
profile. When I see stuff like "Chief Janitor of Everything,
Butler for my CEO," crap like that, don't do that. Okay? That's just dumb. Put standard titles out there that are going
to be found. So if your company is using goofy titles,
forget that. On your LinkedIn profile, make it analogous
with what the market will recognize. Remember, this is your LinkedIn profile. It's not your resume. I want you be consistent between your resume
and your LinkedIn profile. But feel free to take some creative license
in the way in which you identify your titles. Because if the internal title at your company
is something that nobody will recognize, don't use it. Convert it to something that's analogous with
what the outside world will recognize. So if they call the technologist something
goofy, switch it to system engineer, network engineer, whatever it might be that people
will recognize. So use standard titles. And number five on the static side is there's
a tell recruiters option. It's new, tell recruiters. For those of you that are very- It's new, tell recruiters. For those of you who are very actively looking,
what I would do there is you can update some settings that you have ... I think it's like
front and center of your profile now, where you can tell recruiters, "This is what I'm
interested in, these are my skills, these are locations I'd be interested in, hey I
want to move cities," all that good stuff. LinkedIn has a recruiter platform. It's a pay-for service that allows companies
to better manage their activity on Linkedin. They want to appeal, they can sell these large
scale licenses to companies. It's very expensive, but recruiters use them
diligently to communicate with people out there, to search and find people out there,
to manage the communications between the passive candidates or active candidates that they're
trying to recruit. So think what LinkedIn is doing is they're
looking for ways to actually give that recruiter more insight into the people. You're getting kind of a head start. Another thing that you're doing that I get
a question a lot about, "Well, I want to move cities, I want to do this and that", it's
a great spot to do that. So let's just recap it real quick. You got the profile. Make sure the profile is filled out. You've got the skills section. Make sure the skills are filled out. You got connections. Make sure you grow them. You got standard job titles, make sure you
do that. And you got the recruiter feature where you
can tell them and put some insight about you. So that's pretty cool. So those are my five static suggestions. Let's move on to my dynamic suggestions. Now one of the big things we talked about
was profile views. There is no doubt in my mind that whoever's
profile is getting a lot of traction, is going to higher in the search results. So what can you do without spending all day
sitting on LinkedIn to get more profile views? So I've got ... Well, depending on how you
want to count, about four, eight suggestions. All right, my first suggestion is share. Sharing is good. So if you see something that you like, an
article, even outside on the internet that you read, share it to LinkedIn. If you see something on LinkedIn that you
like, share that. You want a status update of your own something,
write that, share that. Heck, I got loads of stuff out there for you
to share. You can go share my stuff. As a matter of fact, don't just share from
LinkedIn. If you're loving this, make sure to give me
a thumbs up now and share this while we still got at least another half an hour or so to
go. But sharing is great, because people will
see that you're sharing. Your connections will see that you're sharing. They might potentially share it. That will cause them to start clicking on
your profile. I do it. When somebody shares a message that I love
... Now sometimes they're sharing somebody else's message that I love. I will go and look at that person's ... I'll
look at both of their profiles. So sharing is a great way. We've got manual sharing that we do, and we've
got systematic sharing that we do. The systematic stuff is a much more advanced
technique, but pick times throughout the day. Maybe you do this three times a day, maybe
it's before you get into work, lunch time you make a share, in the evening when you
get home, or on the train or wherever. Hopefully not in the car while you're driving. But just share, sharing is great. So that's the first one. The second thing that I would say, this also
falls under sharing, but this is a little bit different. Write. Write your long form posts. So hopefully you know this, everybody has
the ability to go and write what LinkedIn calls a long form post. It's like little blog post that you can write. You can write anything you want. Put a picture up there, you can put links
in there. LinkedIn has basically given you a blogging
platform. If you go out and write an article, you can
share that. You can share it to your groups that you belong
to. We're not going to get into groups, but you
can share them to the groups. You can share them outside of LinkedIn, you
can share them across your social platforms. It's great stuff. It's hugely, hugely awesome, not just for
anybody who wants to become a subject matter expert and show their prowess in their particular
trade, but if you are a college student, or you are a recent college graduate, or you
are a career changer, if you are a career changer, this is a great technique to start
building collateral about how you're knowledgeable on a particular subject. So think about this. If you go and you write an article and it
takes you a half an hour, and you post it today, and then next week you go writing another
one, you'll have four after a month. You'll have eight after two months. You start circulating that, you can circulate
one today. You write one next week, you can circulate
the same one you circulated today. You can circulate that all next week, and
you can circulate your new article all next week. You can do one in the morning, one in the
evening and so forth. Now you can start getting more traffic. But what it does is when somebody actually
lands on your profile, or if you send me a resume, I'm going to go look at your profile. I pull it up, I'm going to notice that, oh
wow, that person has written a number of articles on their subject. Maybe it's an opinion piece, maybe it's an
editorial, maybe it's just a how-to article, but I'm going to look at that, I'm going to
take note. I'm not going to read the articles, not usually,
just for time's sake, but I'm going to get the sense that you've got some creditability. You've got some street cred in your area. No one can prevent you from doing that, and
that stuff sits on your LinkedIn profile. That's part of beautifying your profile I
said we weren't really going to get into that, but the fact of the matter is that when I
land on your profile, I can go and I can see that you have all those articles. That, number one, that's telling me that you're
knowledgeable. Number two, it's telling me you're taking
the time and the initiative. So if you are a career changer, it is one
great way. Research up on where you want to go, start
writing about it. Don't worry, you'll be knowledgeable enough. There's plenty of books and plenty of research
that are out there. If you can't at least do that, then you don't
want that career change bad enough. If you're a college student and you're eyeing
your way, and you're trying to build up, and you're trying to get out of school, and you're
trying to get that first job, you can start writing those one-a-month for a year. Think about that. Think about what your profile's going to look
like. Think about that. That's a big honking deal. So make sure you write. On the next one... Hey I don't know if you guys can see this. Can you see this? Like and comment. Liking is good, too. Commenting is good, too. So whenever you like something or whenever
you comment, in my feed it says, "Kara liked so and so's article", "Kara commented on so
and so's article". So what? That's great. Now you're putting yourself into circulation
even more into the feed, and you're also increasing the likelihood that people will view your
profile because you are liking and commenting. It's the same kind of thing. It's almost like an automatic share. It's almost like an automatic share, but I
would still share it anyway. So liking and commenting, and then the last
one is respond. Respond to your notifications. So if you're sending stuff out, and you're
sending articles out ... And you guys have probably seen my ... Well, hopefully you've
seen my LinkedIn feed. So every hour or two there's a new article
or a quote card, or something that I will circulate, because I'm constantly putting
things out there, because I want you to learn. But people will comment and people will like
stuff, and that will give me notifications. It will also alert me that, "Oh, so and so
commented, I want to make sure I comment back." You can adjust your settings in LinkedIn to
get emails and all kinds of stuff. But the point is, if you're responding, the
more action you have going, the better off you'll be. All right, so let's just recap the dynamic
stuff. You want to share. Make sure to share. Now this stuff you want to do is you want
to make sure that you're writing the long form stuff. Make sure to do that. You want to like and comment, and ... I'm
not very good with these cards. And you want to respond. You want to respond. So I hope you enjoyed that. But you can see that it isn't just about putting
up a good profile and filling it all in. People are telling you to do that. That's not true. You can put a beautiful profile together and
no one will ever see it unless you're getting the right connections, you're getting the
profile views, your keywords are optimized, the thing's completely filled in, you start
getting some activity going on that profile. So I hope you enjoyed that. A couple of housekeeping things. Before we roll into questions, I want to tell
you a couple things that I just want you to keep an eye out for. Now, if you are out there and you are listening
to this on any of the podcast platforms, I'm going to say so long to you and have a great
week, and I'll see you next Thursday.
